Rewriting the Rules of Brewing Beer

By Clay Risen

Photo by JoeRuny/Flickr CC

A few months ago, at
SAVOR
--a massive, multi-day craft beer festival in
Washington, D.C.--I had the chance to watch Sam Calagione in action.
Calagione is the owner of Delaware's Dogfish Head brewery and a
leading figure in the "extreme beer" movement, making brews that test
the limits of hoppiness, alcohol level, and ingredients, and that
evening he was giving a one-man panel on "ancient" beers.

I'd heard lots of stories about Calagione, that he was as
much a performer and raconteur as a beer master, the sort of guy you
want to crack a beer with, especially if it's one of his. He didn't
disappoint. He greeted everyone at the door, tanned and smiling
broadly, handing out copies of his latest book. Later, speaking
without notes on the dais, he wove into his presentation anecdotes,
diatribes, trivia, and tasting insights, all with the laid-back
bluntness of a Long Beach surf bum.

In recent years Dogfish Head has been recreating ancient beer recipes, many derived from residues found at excavation sites.

Calagione embraces the "extreme" label, but at the panel he also
pushed back against it. The beer most Americans know derives from a
strict set of rules set out by the Germans in the 16th century,
the so-called
Reinheitsgebot
. But, Calagione pointed out, beer in some
form has been brewed for thousands of years. So why restrict
ourselves? And why do we call some recipes "extreme," even though, in
the long march of time, they are more typically "beer" than your
average pilsner?

To prove his point, in recent years Dogfish Head, at times working an
archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania, has been recreating ancient beer recipes,
many derived from residues found at excavation sites. None would meet
the German definition of beer; they mix in seeds, rice flakes,
berries, honey--the sort of good stuff our ancient ancestors would have
on hand, but which we, for whatever reason, keep far away from our
beer vats.

Photo by kowitz/Flickr CC

Dogfish Head has made four ancient brews, so far: Theobroma, based on
Mayan and Aztec chocolate drinks; Chateau Jiahu, from a 9,000 year-old
Chinese recipe; Midas Touch, drawn from residue found at what is
believed to be the tomb of King Midas, in Asia Minor; and Sah'tea, the
latest, derived from a thousand-year-old Finnish quaff (the original
drink is called Sahti).

The brewing process for Sah'tea, as Burkhard Bilger explained in a
profile of Calagione
in the
New Yorker
,
is an elaborate one. The rye-based wort is caramelized by adding hot
rocks to the vat (tenth-century Finns used wood barrels to brew, which
meant open flames were out as a heat source). But that's only the
first step; as Bilger writes,

The last stage of the brewing process was the most
unorthodox. Traditionally, sahti is flavored with juniper alone, but
Calagione wanted something more unusual. After the hops and the
juniper berries had been added to the wort, he took the bag of spices
from his truck and steeped it in a bucket of hot water. The mixture
contained cardamom, coriander, ginger, allspice, rampe leaves,
lemongrass, curry powder, and black tea, custom blended for Calagione
in India. It would be added at the last moment, he said, so that its
volatile flavors wouldn't boil off. The idea was to amplify the
already spicy flavors of the juniper berries and the Hefeweizen
yeast--to turn the sahti into Sahtea.

We tried a few of these beers, among others, at the SAVOR panel, but I
later picked them all up to try again at home. For all their
differences in ingredients and brewing details, they have similar
characteristics: thick, foamy mouthfeels; strong alcohol overtones;
and rich, spicy flavors.

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Midas Touch
, at 9 percent ABV, was my favorite, though my wife
preferred the Theobroma. The Midas Touch pours a thick head and a dark
golden, red-tinged color. The nose is sweet, almost like bubble gum,
though it's probably the Muscat grapes and raisins Calagione throws
in. It tastes hoppier than the others, though it clocks in at just 12
international bitterness units (IBU), and the hops are balanced
against a brawny sweetness. Maybe it was the royal back story, but I
couldn't help imagining a strong, dry ale wrapped in a golden honey
robe.

The
Theobroma
, on the other hand, was the most beer-like of the four,
and to me the least interesting. It pours a thin head with a light
brown color. It's made with cocoa powder and cocoa nibs, and you taste
them right up front, when the beer smooth and rich. But it's also made
with ancho chilies, and soon the spice takes over, sticking around on
the back of an echoing bitterness. For all that, I found it boring.
But Joanna disagreed--she loved it, finding all sorts of flavors in the
brew, including honey, wood, and peach. Like the Midas Touch, it's 9
percent ABV, and its flavors are likewise built along a solid alcohol
backbone.

The
Sah'tea
carries its spice forward, with the flavor of black pepper
opening the door to an array of tastes--black tea (a blend made custom
for Dogfish Head in India), cloves, citrus, ginger, and spiced
oranges. Yet again, this beer is 9 percent ABV, though the alcohol was
less obvious this time. The head is moderately sized and the color
moderately golden, but the mouthfeel is immodestly thick and foamy, as
if the beer didn't open up when it left the bottle and instead waited
until it reached your mouth.

Then we came to the end:
Chateau Jiahu
, the oldest known brewing
recipe in the world. Ironically, it has the most baroque ingredients.
The folks at Dogfish Head can explain it better than I can:

In keeping with historic evidence, Dogfish brewers used
pre-gelatinized rice flakes, Wildflower honey, Muscat grapes, barley
malt, hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers. The rice and barley
malt were added together to make the mash for starch conversion and
degradation. The resulting sweet wort was then run into the kettle.
The honey, grapes, Hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers were then
added. The entire mixture was boiled for 45 minutes, then cooled. The
resulting sweet liquid was pitched with a fresh culture of Sake yeast
and allowed to ferment a month before the transfer into a chilled
secondary tank.

That's a long way from the IPA my friends and I brewed (rather
unsuccessfully) in their basement last month. But is it better? Alas,
both Joanna and I put it last among the four. Like the others, it has
a thick head and mouthfeel, with a honey brown color. There's honey in
the nose, too, and honey in the taste, and honey in the...you get the
idea. It verges on sickly sweet, with just hints of the many spices
and herbs added to the brew, other than a slight spice and a bitter
finish.

All that aside, I'd drink it again, and that counts as a victory for
Calagione. After all, he's as interested in making a profit as making
a point: that beer--not "extreme" beer, or "freaky-weird" beer, just
beer--extends far beyond the limits placed on it by sixteenth century
German princes.